Small but Stylish: SONY VAIO VGN-T2XRP-S Notebook Review. Page 8

We would like to introduce to you an economical, yet sufficiently high-performing configuration with a wide screen display, which won’t call for an upgrade in near future. This is a notebook from SONY based on the Ultra Low Voltage processor with the highest clock rate, i.e. on Pentium M ULV 753 with the default frequency of 1.2GHz.

Testing Methods

The hard drive of the VAIO VGN-T2XRP/S was formatted in NTFS before the tests. Then I installed Microsoft Windows XP professional with DirectX 9.0c and Windows Media Encoder 9.0 with Windows Media Player 9.0. Power-saving services, the audio subsystem, network services were all disabled for the duration of the tests. The notebook was tested at the maximum brightness and resolution (1280x768) of the screen.

I set the Windows Taskbar to hide automatically and also chose the following settings: “Classic” Desktop theme, no background image, no screensaver.

Two power modes were used. First, I selected the Always On power mode for the maximum performance and the shortest battery run-down time. Then, I switched to the Max Battery mode for the maximum battery run-down time.

In the Idle mode (when the notebook bears no load at all) I began to play a DVD movie. Generally speaking, DVD playback is one of the hardest operational modes for a notebook’s battery: high power consumption of the optical drive combines with a high brightness of the screen and a very high sound volume. And since DVDs are so popular today, we need to know how much time the notebook can last on its battery under such conditions.